Welcome to the Natural Resource Partners Quarterly Earnings Conference Call. My name is Rache and I will be facilitating the audio portion of today's interactive broadcast. [Operator Instructions]. At this time I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Kathy Roberts, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Rache. Good morning one and welcome to the Natural Resource Partners' first quarter 2018 conference call. Today's call is being webcast and a replay will be available on our website for seven days. Joining me today will be Craig Nunez, President and Chief Operating Officer; Chris Zolas, Chief Financial Officer; and Kevin Craig, our Executive Vice President of our Coal Division. Some of our comments today may include forward-looking statements reflecting NRP's views about future events. These matters involve risk and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to materially differ from our forward-looking statements. These risks are described in NRP's Form 10-K and other SEC filings. We undertake no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason. Our comments today also include non-GAAP financial measures. Additional details and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in our first quarter 2017 press release, which can be found on our website. I also would like to remind everyone that we do not intend to discuss the outlook for production or pricing in our coal segments because such information would be a [indiscernible] and we are bound by contract to such information confidential. We will also not discuss pricing or sales with respect to our construction aggregates business for competitive reasons. In addition I refer you to general resources public disclosures and commentary for specific questions regarding our soda ash business. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Craig, our President and Chief Operating Officer.

Thank you, Kathy, and welcome everyone to our quarterly call. It's been more than a year since more than a year since we completed the series of transactions that recapitalize the partnership and we now have four full quarters of results with what I'll call new NRP. Our coal royalty segment has stabilized after a multi-year period of extreme volatility and our soda ash investment and construction aggregates business have held steady. NRP generated significant amounts of cash over these last 12 months according to 235 million of EBITDA, 134 million of distributable cash flow and 128 million of free cash flow. In addition we paid 22 million of distributions to common unitholders and increased common unitholder equity by $50 million or over 30% before the beneficial impact of a new accounting standard Chris will discuss in a moment. While the royalty nature of our coal assets means that we do not have as much visibility in the future performance as our [indiscernible] who are actually mining the market in coal. We are becoming increasingly comfortable with each passing quarter that our recent financial performance is indicative of a sustainable run-rate that we can plan on for the future. With that in mind we remain laser focused on continuing to strengthen our balance sheet while maintaining liquidity to provide a margin safety for prudent business operations. We reiterate our previously stated goal to achieve a leverage ratio over time defined as debt to EBITDA of less than three times while maintaining minimum liquidity of $100 million. We believe this substantial delevering and derisking of the capital structure is the quickest path to maximizing the intrinsic value and in turn the market value of our common equity. With 35% of our common units owned by insiders rest assured that our interests…

Thank you, Craig. Good morning everyone and thanks again for joining us. The first quarter operating performance represents a good start to the year. We generated $20 million of operating cash flow during the quarter which includes a semiannual interest payment of our parent company bonds of $18 million. Net income attributable to common unit holders at our general partner was $19 million representing a $15 million increase compared to last year's first quarter primarily due to $8 million of debt modification expense recognized by share related to our recapitalization transactions and also due to 5 million of less interest expense in 2018 as a result of our lower debt balance. Compared to the prior quarter net income available to common unitholders in general partner decreased 4 million primarily due to the seasonal nature of our aggregates business. Basic and diluted earnings per common unit for the quarter were a $1.49 and a $1.15 respectively. Before moving to our segment results I would like to briefly discuss the impact of adopting the new GAAP revenue recognition standard in Q1, while there was no impact to revenue from our soda ash or construction aggregate segments. The new standard did impact our coal royalty segment. Historically we recorded minimum payments received as deferred revenue and did not recognize these payments as revenue until either recoupment occurred or the recruitment period expired. Under the new standard we are required to recognize minimum payments as revenue when we believe that it is unlikely they will ever be recouped. While the adoption of the new standard will not have a material impact on our coal royalty segment revenue or the income statement it did have a significant one time adoption impact on our balance sheet. The cumulative effective adoption, reduced deferred revenue liability by 90…

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Mark Levin with Seaport Global.

Couple of quick questions, what are the impact of weather in Q1 whether it be on the coal business as it relates to logistics or even the aggregates business, anyway you can help us quantify how weather might have impacted EBITDA?

Mark, this is Kevin Craig. We think in the coal segment we did have exact from weather specific operations and then also rail network backup, probably in the range of a couple of million dollars in back to the coal segment. In the aggregate segment was river traffic was slowed up a bit Mark but it's not a material amount $0.5 million of less EBITDA as a result of that.

And Craig, you made an interesting comment I just want to try to pick up on this during your remarks about the core business is stabilizing and if you go back and look I guess maybe three or four quarters of EBITDA from the coal business it looks pretty consistent relatively narrow range. I know you guys don’t give I'm not going to ask here for your guidance but you did make the comment specifically about maybe the stabilization or you've been seeing stabilization there. Maybe you can elaborate or expand a little bit on that comment?

Mark, glad you picked up on that because we do want to let you know that in fact we do feel those markets have stabilized and our business is stabilizing. We are not giving guidance per say but we are looking what's happened in recent quarters and it does appear that in this current environment that's looking more and more like a sustainable run rate and so we're beginning to take that into account as we do our planning.

That's great to hear. The last question I was going to ask just was around the $100 million liquidity target. Is there any specific reason why $100 million that number I mean why 100 versus let say 50 or 75, what's the thoughts process around that $100 million number?

Well a good bit of it is judgment mark, as a B credit with S&P and AA credit with Moody's access to capital, the financing markets is never guaranteed and so we feel that we need to have a cushion of additional liquidity above and beyond what we need for our mark to market operate activities just in case the market's not available to us when we need it to happen.

Your next question comes from the line of Nick [indiscernible] with Stifel.

I wanted to ask you about the 10.5% holdco notes, what are your thoughts in terms of the ability or opportunity to lower the cost of debt with nearing call date in March of 2019?

Well on those notes we have call premium on the -- every year until one year prior to the 2022 maturity and it is difficult to make the math work to pay that call premium and refinance and end up with lower net cost and benefit from company but sure you did the math works and the demand for the paper is there we would certainly look forward on that the opportunity.

Okay. So in terms of the outlook for the credit you are talking about taking leverage down from 3.5 to 3 turns, the strength of the free cash flow generation my belief is that it's completely underappreciated by the high yield universe and so I think ideally in the next several quarters the high yield market will only pick up start the credit. That's all I have to say. Thank you.

: Thank you.

[Operator Instructions]. There are no further questions at this time.

Thank you everyone for joining our call. We thank you for your support and your interest in NRP. Things are moving along as I think we all would have expected hoped they would have after we completed our recapitalization transactions last year. The company continued to generate net significant amounts of cash and for the foreseeable future appears to be well-positioned to continue doing so. So thanks again for your support. Have a good day. Good bye.

This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect at this time.